Thursday, 4 October 2012

A Quiet Moment - Dee Pratt

My strangest experience occurred midflight on a
trip across the Atlantic. I was still in college, heading to Europe to study abroad.
Because the other program participants were scattered all over the
country, each of us had booked our own flights and travelled separately. I didn’t know a soul onboard.

This particular trip was only the second or third
flight I’d ever taken in my life, and it was the first time I’d flown at
night. Out the window, the lights of New York were fading
into the distance, and the vast blackness of the ocean stretched out in the
other direction. We hadn’t yet reached
our cruising altitude when the captain came over the loudspeaker. He wanted to let us know that we were about
to go through a rough patch of weather and might experience some turbulence.

Just as the captain finished his warning, brilliant
light flashed on the left side of the plane, followed immediately by a loud crack. The cabin lights dimmed for what could not
have been more than a second, but felt like an eternity. I could almost feel the understanding pass
over my fellow passengers: we had been
struck by lightning.

The really bizarre part was what happened
next—nothing. Total stillness.

Absolute quiet. No one cried out. There was no commotion. Preternatural calm filled the cabin. How many people were on that flight? Two hundred?
And no one made a sound. It was
completely surreal. I’d like to think
that it was a kind of communal acceptance of our collective fate, but probably
it was just that fear had reached up and grabbed us all by the throat. Either way, we were all connected to some
sort of universal, primal emotion in that instant.

The silence was finally broken when the captain
came back on over the loudspeaker to confirm, quite casually, that we had, in
fact, been struck by lightning. He then
talked for a few minutes about how that sort of thing happens all the time, how
planes have backup systems for their backup systems, and how we were never in
any danger. I’m sure we weren’t. We didn’t plummet into the ocean. After an otherwise unremarkable flight, we
arrived safely at our destination. But
I’ll never forget that moment, that quiet moment.

You can buy Attachment as a standalone short story Here and find out more about Dee Pratt on her Website